Monday, July 25, 2011

Exercise 4.8 - Tungsten and Fluorescent light

Fort his part I had to take three pictures in a room lit by tungsten lamp with different white balances. The frame had to cover both indoors and outdoors objects.

18mm; f/11; 1/3 sec; ISO 400; white balance - Incandescent

18mm; f/11; 1/3 sec; ISO 400; white balance - Sunny

18mm; f/11; 1/3 sec; ISO 400; white balance - Auto

The Incandescent white balance works the best here. The lighting outside and inside look most natural and balanced. "Sunny" white balance adds too much of yellow colour and outside objects are not seen at all. "Auto" white balance makes indoors both indoors and outdoors parts of the picture a bit overexposed.

PART TWO:

For this part I had to take images in rooms lit by fluorescent light, setting white balance to Auto and Fluorescent and identify the difference.

18mm; f/10; 1/6 sec; white balance - Fluorescent 3

18mm; f/10; 1/6 sec; white balance - Auto

In this case the difference can be only slightly seen. Fluorescent lamp is hanging on the ceiling and light is spread in the whole room. fluorescent white balance adds a bit of green colour to the picture.

For the second pair of pictures I took small fluorescent lamp in the kitchen and experimented a bit wth different levels of fluorescent white balance.

58mm; f/10; 1/3 sec; white balance - Fluorescent 3

58mm; f/10; 1/3 sec; white balance - Fluorescent 2

58mm; f/10; 1/3 sec; white balance - Fluorescent 1

58mm; f/10; 1/3 sec; white balance - Auto

As can be noticed here, the higher is the level of Fluorescent, the more green tone is added to the picture.

The most natural is the one set to Fluorescent 2. Auto and Fluorescent 1 have too much of yellow, and they are actually quite similar to each other, while the fluorescent 3 makes picture too "green".

It may be concluded, that white balance set to Fluorescent is preferable with relevant lighting conditions. Though different levels of the balance should be taken into consideration when taking pictures with such lighting.